MARIPOSA, Calif. – Yosemite Clean Energy (Yosemite), announced they have secured the site for developing their first carbon-negative green hydrogen and renewable natural gas (RNG) production plant in Oroville, California, with groundbreaking scheduled for Q2 of 2022. Yosemite is a sustainable biofuels company devoted to the stewardship of our planet’s natural resources as well as the empowerment of local forest and farm communities to democratize energy production.
Yosemite’s biofuels production facilities will utilize proven Austrian-based gasification technology, successfully commercialized and deployed by Christian Aichernig of Repotec, to produce commercial scale carbon-negative green fuels. The Oroville plant will be the flagship dual-bed gasification facility in the Americas, following over 100,000 hours of commercial run-time across developed plants in Europe, Japan, and South Korea.
California has an estimated 35 million tons of waste woody biomass available annually, currently left to burn, decay, and decompose, emitting immense amounts of greenhouse gases and black carbon. Yosemite will sustainably convert this biomass into syngas, from which carbon negative green hydrogen and RNG is produced using downstream technology already widely commercialized in the US. These-carbon negative fuels will be used to support California’s bold emission targets as it transitions to a carbon neutral economy.
Tom Hobby, the company’s president, stated, “Yosemite and our team of engineers, forest and farm professionals, legal, marketing, and financial teams will lead the company to become the first wood waste biomass plant to produce commercial scale carbon negative green hydrogen and RNG for the California fuel markets.” One plant will produce an estimated 31,000 kg per day of RNG and 12,200 kg per day of green hydrogen. Over the next 10 years, Yosemite plans to have biomass energy plants across California and North America.
Each Yosemite biofuels plant will be locally owned by farmers and forest landowners, who in return will provide wood waste, gathered at the end of the orchard’s lifecycle or through sustainable forest management. Vice-President for Business Development Robert Jackson said, “This is new. This type of ownership in biofuels facilities like ours is the democratization of clean energy. We’re providing an all-new mineral right from a waste stream and converting it to a revenue stream for farmers and forest communities.”
